Digital Governance and Grievance Redressal for 168 Cities

The challenge

A citizen in a small Chhattisgarh town with a broken streetlight or a missed waste pickup had no reliable way to be heard. The state wanted a single grievance redressal system, Nidaan-1100, live across all 168 urban local bodies, alongside a broader e-governance and online building permission platform. Government IT projects of this scale routinely fail at procurement.

My role and approach

Selected as one of the state's Chief Minister Good Governance Fellows and embedded in the Urban Administration & Development Department, I ran the projects from term sheet to onboarding:

• Prepared term sheets, specifications, tender documents, and monitoring frameworks for Nidaan-1100, statewide e-governance, and the Bhawan Sewa online building permission portal
• Managed bid processes end to end: evaluation, vendor onboarding, and post-contract monitoring
• Designed statewide procurement governance across 168 urban local bodies, standardizing process, supplier qualification, and contract management protocols governing roughly $500 million in annual public expenditure
• Beyond the core mandate, built the Secretariat dashboard for PMAY, pulling live data from the central MIS for the state's top decision-makers
• Drafted the state's Slum Rehabilitation Policy and the model RFP for PPP housing projects

The impact

Nidaan-1100 became one of the state government's iconic citizen-service projects, giving 168 cities a single channel for public grievances. The fellowship year taught me government from the inside: how files move, how decisions land, and how digital systems succeed or fail on the strength of their procurement.